{television} – Page 66 – { feuilleton }

Hello Dali!

Russell Harty and Salvador Dalí, 1973.

This would have been a real find if the quality wasn’t so poor. Hello Dali! was a 50-minute documentary film about Salvador Dalí broadcast in the UK in 1973 as part of ITV’s Aquarius arts strand. The whole thing is on YouTube chopped into five parts and is unfortunately blighted by severe ghosting throughout. Apart from that it’s perfectly watchable.

Some conversations are subtitled so viewers are better able to make sense of Dalí’s English/Spanish/French dialect.

Brits who are old enough may remember Aquarius which was replaced in the late 70s by The South Bank Show, a programme using the same format of a short studio introduction followed by a self-contained film. In place of the SBS‘s Melvyn Bragg we have Humphrey Burton introducing a film directed by Bruce Gowers. Russell Harty is the front man, seen here in the days before he achieved greater fame as a gossipy chat-show host. I’d been wanting to see this for a long time, having lost a video tape of it years ago. I never saw the original broadcast but it was screened again after Dalí’s death in 1989, and I remembered it as being particularly good for showing a slightly more human side to the eccentric and occasionally annoying artist. So it is, giving us a brief portrait of Dalí in his 69th year, preoccupied at that time with the construction of his museum in Figueres. The nature of Harty and Gowers coup in getting the artist to allow a film crew into his home can be found in subsequent documentaries many of which use uncredited extracts from these interviews. It’s the brief moments of interview which make this even though they reveal little, it’s refreshing seeing Dalí talking conversationally rather than putting on a performance.

The early 70s saw the last flare of real interest in Dalí from the world at large. Dalí and Surrealism in general had a resurgence of popularity in the late 60s as a consequence of psychedelic culture: a number of books by or about the artist were published or reprinted, among them Peter Owen’s 1973 revival of the novel Hidden Faces which Dalí had written in 1944. About the same time Alejandro Jodorowsky was circling the Dalí camp trying to inveigle the artist into portraying the Emperor in his planned film adaptation of Dune. One detail worthy of note in the conversation with Russell Harty is mention of a golden toilet, something which Jodorowsky says Dalí wanted as his throne if he was going to be filmed. We never got to see Jodorowsky’s Dune but it’s good to find this documentary available once again. Here’s hoping a better copy turns up eventually.

• Hello Dali! Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4 | Pt 5

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and the City
• Dalí’s Elephant
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
• Dalí and Film
• Salvador Dalí’s apocalyptic happening
• Dalí Atomicus
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

Weekend links 66

A design by Emma Kunz (1892–1963).

• Following the news this week it’s worth reminding people of a great post put together by Adam Curtis back in January, Rupert Murdoch—A portrait of Satan. One detail there concerns the death of chat show host Russell Harty in 1988. This week the London Review of Books posted an extract from Alan Bennett’s diaries referring to the Harty episode where he notes how the tabloid practice of getting private phone numbers from the police was common and widespread, not simply the actions of a single newspaper. For more about the deathbed hounding of Russell Harty (and Bennett’s loathing of Murdoch) see Writing Home. Related: Dennis Potter shortly before his death discussing his desire to kill Rupert Murdoch.

• Don’t get mad, get even: Hakim Bey’s Black Djinn Curse: “How to invoke a terrible curse on a malign institution.” See also: Black magic as revolutionary action.

• Village Voice talks to Linda Manz about her experience as a young actor in Days of Heaven, The Wanderers and Out of the Blue.

• Truth Wins Out infiltrates the “ex-gay” clinic run by Michelle Bachmann’s husband.

• Free Situationist booklets by Larry Law. Related: films by Guy Debord at Ubuweb.

• Have tea with Doctor Dee in Mortlake, London, next Wednesday.

• Publisher Peter Owen: Sixty years of innovation.

• Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love.

• A conversation with Brian Eno by Ben Sisario.

• The mysterious minaret of Jam, Afghanistan.

• Stereolab cover designs at Hardformat.

• Orgone Accumulator (1973) by Hawkwind | Cloudbusting (1985) by Kate Bush | Orgasmatron (1986) by Motörhead | Orgasmatron (1993) by Sandoz | Orgone Donor (2004) by Deathprod.

Network 21 TV

What was Network 21? It’s easiest to grab an explanation from the people responsible:

NeTWork 21 was a pirate television station which broadcast a 30mns program on Fridays from midnight throughout April to September 1986 in London. It had never been done before, and has not been done since anywhere in the UK. The broadcasts took place on channel 21 of the UHF band, slightly below ITV, using a low powered transmitter covering 8-10 miles across London. Program content was literally hand made, shot with a Sony Video 8 camera, edited on Low Band U-Matic, and broadcast on VHS. They showed slices of London’s artistic buzzing underground life as well as casual glimpses of everyday life, something which the normal television stations never showed. We would also offer slots to whoever was willing to appear on pirate TV, saying, showing or doing whatever they wanted, with no pre/post-production censorship of any kind. Because of our low tech approach, we could easily film people, situations and events with minimum disruption and maximum interaction. We were also free to choose program content and style according to our own mood, without having to worry about ratings, advertisers or good taste standards. (more)

In 1986 the UK only had four TV channels, and none of them ran through the night so theoretically there was plenty of space available for other broadcasters. In practice any unauthorised activity was always swiftly curtailed. Those of us outside London could only read about these illicit broadcasts but now it’s possible to jump back in time to the gloomy heart of Thatcherite Britain via the Network 21 YouTube channel. All the clips are fairly short and lean heavily towards the (for want of a better term) Industrial culture familiar from the early RE/Search publications, Simon Dwyer’s sorely-missed Rapid Eye, and Cabaret Voltaire’s “television magazine” TV Wipeout: William Burroughs (reading at the London Final Academy event in 1982), Brion Gysin, Psychic TV, Diamanda Galás, Derek Jarman et al. There’s also Roz Kaveney on passion, and Simon Watney with a news item related to the AIDS crisis in the US. The network website has complete listings for each broadcast.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ICA talks archived
• The Final Academy

Loving Boys by Christian Schad

Loving Boys (1929).

German artist Christian Schad (1894–1982) wasn’t gay but his New Objectivity paintings were often overtly sexual, as with his most well-known work, Self-Portrait with Model (1927). This drawing was posted in a piece about Schad at Weimar Art, and, given the place and period from which it originates, wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood’s memoir about gay life in pre-war Berlin which was recently dramatised by the BBC.

For more about Schad’s work and erotic concerns there’s Lewd Awakening: Rediscovering a German Connoisseur of Sex at Village Voice. Ten Dreams has a gallery with more of his paintings.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

“Who is this who is coming?”

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968).

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure—how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a sea-bird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

MR James, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

One of the alleged highlights of this year’s Christmas television from the BBC was a new adaptation of an MR James ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. The film starred John Hurt and came with the same truncated title, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, as was used for Jonathan Miller’s 1968 version, also a BBC production. The story title comes originally from a poem by Robert Burns. The new work was adapted by Neil Cross and directed by Andy de Emmony, and I describe it as an alleged highlight since I wasn’t impressed at all by the drama, the most recent attempt by the BBC to continue a generally creditable tradition of screening ghost stories at Christmas. Before I deal with my disgruntlement I’ll take the opportunity to point the way to some earlier derivations. (And if you don’t want the story spoiled, away and read it first.)

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